Re: Talents & Martial Arts
 

What's wrong with giving him Skills at DX +4 or +5? It's a lot simpler and he doesn't really need all that many. He'd want DX+2 for Weapon Master effects anyway.

There's not a lot of durable reason to acquire multiple melee weapon skills anyway. Get a Fine Broadsword and you don't need a merely Good Axe and that's doubly true if you've got WM:Broadsword but not WM:Alll Knightly Weapons.

Who's Who made a perfectly good Wiliiam Marshall long before Talents were created. This looks like a solution in search of a problem to me.

Re: Talents & Martial Arts
 

Isn't that the problem this solution is supposed to address? That is it's expensive to build a character with high levels of a lot of weapon skills, but that there is not a lot of benefit to it, making those wasted points even though the character concept may call for it.

Re: Talents & Martial Arts
 

Why is wasting pts on a Talent superior to wasting pts on raw Skills or Attributes?

Re: Talents & Martial Arts
 

Attributes may be inappropriate for the concept, such as by making the putative veteran warrior incomparably graceful and masterful at all DX-skills, not just those actually related to his long experience and warlike training.

Talents, meanwhile, are a more point-efficient way to give characters high levels of multiple skills than raising every single individual skill in it.

Re: Talents & Martial Arts
 

By talent (all martial arts) I mean Brawling, Boxing, Judo, Karate, Sumo, and Wrestling. That's even a a rules-legal talent.
DX (no basic speed -25%, no noncombat skills -25%) looks totally reasonable. The additional -25% for only a certain category of combat skills is iffy, but there's granularity issues with talents.

Re: Talents & Martial Arts
 

Don't buy any DX Skills he's not supposed to be good at and take Quirk: Stomps around like he's clumsy. Incompetence: Dancing even.

Re: Talents & Martial Arts
 

Just curious, but how many points do you think Barristan Selmy should be? The way the books describe him, he was basically the top swordsman in Westeros in his day (and can still hold his own) and, admittedly, they do seem to indicate he was talented, not just skilled, but it may not be impractical to make him a DX 12 character who uses the skills from the Knightly Mounted Combat (High Medieval) style in Martial Arts, whose top skill is sword at ~18 (~20 in his youth).

Re: Talents & Martial Arts
 

I could see something like this for say a Buffy the Vampire Slayer Talent group that covers all melee/ and muscle powered missile weapon/thrown weapons for Slayers in addition to a high DX. While slayers typically either fight unarmed or with a stake, they also pick up skill mastery with new weapons with tremendous speed and relatively minimal training which hints at fast training times in combat skills.

Re: Talents & Martial Arts
 

Why?!?!?

That's a cludgy and inaccurate design.

Also, what do you do about DX-based skills he's clearly trained in, but not supposed to be as good at as he is at fighting?

He knows how to swim and climb, but he's not a world-famous climber and swimmer. He is, however, world famous as a lancer and swordsman, and he can evidently use axes, maces, staves and daggers at or close to 'best in the world' too.

I realise that you could model this by putting 24+ points into each and every individual combat skill, but that's monstrously inefficient. When you have a combat skill, adding 'back-up' ones has a much reduced utility.

For Advantages, this can be dealt with using Alternate Abilities costs. For skills, that rule in unusable, but Talents and Job Training offer another method to achieve the same thing.

Why is that a bad thing?

Re: Talents & Martial Arts
 

He's going to want his best combat skills at DX+2 or more. Just one pt in other DX-based skills might well be enough. If that's still too much use Dabbler.

As to why custom Talents are bad it's not so much that they're "bad" as they are _whiny_. "I want a character who's good at a lot of DX-based Skills without having a high DX and I want it to be cheap too! So change the rules until I can get what I want!" irritates me.

There's usually a better, simpler answer elsewhere in the rules.